5 January 2014

NHL man-games lost and CHIP analysis - mid-season report

This is my latest update for the 2013/14 regular season on which teams have been hit hardest by injuries by trying to place a value on the games missed by players due to injury/illness.

The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2013/14 cap charge (including bonuses), then take the aggregate of these figures for each team and divide by 82. This indicator of value lost to a team by injury/illness is called CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Players).

This analysis covers every team up to mid-season, i.e. after the 41st game for each. (This follows on from my 30-game analysis.)

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For a more regular snapshot, CHIP rankings are also being fed into Rob Vollman's Team Luck calculator on a weekly basis

Alternatively...
Again, for a different indicator of player "value", I've also illustrated a similar metric based on TOI/G alongside the CHIP numbers. Clearly, neither cap charge nor TOI/G are perfect measures of player value, since each have a number of limitations and inconsistencies, but they provide a decent comparison and the results do vary somewhat.

A quick summary of the alternative metric:

TOI/G replaces cap charge as the measure of value in the calculation

For goalies, TOI/G has been worked out as Total Minutes Played / Games Dressed For* - i.e. a goalie playing every minute of 75% of the games, zero in the rest, would end up with a TOI/G of 45 minutes (or close to it, once you factor in OT and so on). [*Actually, "Games Played by Team - Games Missed by Goalie" - I'm not inclined to disentangle any three-goalie systems or minor-league conditioning stints.]

This arguably overstates the worth of starting goalies somewhat, but it's simple and you could equally argue that a workhorse goalie is the hardest position to replace, so it's fair for them to have a much higher TOI/G figure

Where a player hasn't played all year or where a player fairly clearly has a reduced TOI/G figure due to getting injured in their only game or one of very few games, I've used TOI/G from last season (or further back if necessary)

For each player, multiply games missed by TOI/G to get (for a more palatable name) Cumulative Minutes of Injured Player (CMIP)

Take the aggregate of CMIP for the team and divide by games played by the team to arrive at AMIP (Average Minutes of Injured Players) - it feels more understandable expressing this metric as an average per game (whereas CHIP is a running total)

The figures...
The table below shows:

Total CHIP for each team over the first 41 games of the regular season, as well as the distribution of CHIP by position

The player who has contributed most to the team's CHIP figure

The number of players with a CHIP contribution of over $250,000 (think of it as being equivalent to a $1m player missing 20 games or a $4m player missing five games)

AMIP for each team over the same period (e.g. an AMIP of 40:00 could be seen as the team missing two 20-minute per game players for every game this season) - for non-interesting reasons, average TOI figures aren't quite measured at the 30-game point this time around for a few teams, but of no great significance to the analysis

CHIP figures in graphical form:

The following is a ranking of teams by CHIP over Games 31-41 only, to further illustrate some of the biggest movers since last time:

10 second analysis...

Columbus sneak into top CHIP spot thanks to Nathan Horton's continued (but now ended) absence, plus another Marian Gaborik owee and Sergei Bobrovsky's turn on the NHL goalie groinaround

A very impressive and highly publicised (amazingly) 95 MGL in 11 games piled up by Pittsburgh, who obviously went 9-2 in that stretch, possibly in part due to facing plenty of non-playoff opposition in the fearsome Eastern Conference and 37 of the MGL being down to Tomas Vokoun, Andrew Ebbett, Tanner Glass and Jayson Megna

If weighting by TOI, Columbus haven't suffered as much as Pittsburgh, Carolina and Anaheim, although each of the latter three teams' AMIP figures are probably somewhat inflated by the weight placed on long absences to Vokoun, Anton Khudobin and Viktor Fasth respectively

Ottawa's good health (prior to the latest Jason Spezza injury) is still pretty remarkable, but their CHIP figure pro-rated over 82 games would still only put them the third healthiest over the six years I have recorded (behind Carolina's 64 MGL and $1.2m CHIP in 2010/11 and the Rangers' 30 MGL and $1.3m CHIP in 2008/09)

Worth repeating that the Flyers have been essentially very healthy all year too - they would lie in a clear 29th place by CHIP if discounting the permanent/long-term losses of Chris Pronger and M-A Bourdon

The next lists are the top 30 individual CHIP and CMIP contributions:

A few of the big CHIPers (Horton, Jovanovski, Clowe, Quick, Bozak) are now playing and living up to every penny of their contracts again, so expect the very long-term cases to dominate the top of the table the rest of the way Tampa Bay clearly missing the minutes usually munched by Brian Lee much more than those by the Stamkos guy.

Where does it hurt?
This is another update of the crude injury-by-location analysis. Again, I’ve just used the descriptions found in the player profiles on tsn.ca, so the figures will encompass all the inaccuracies and vagueness within them. It should give a broad indication, if nothing else, though.

The crude rate of injuries (instances / total games played) continues to regress back towards that in previous years, now at 0.82 per game (0.80 last year, 0.78 in 2011/12 and 0.76 in 2010/11).

Derick BrASSard's unfortunate case of back side pressure sadly only got classified as lower body, while I will continue to monitor closely the outbreak of "total body soreness" currently afflicting Patrik Elias and Anton Volchenkov in New Jersey.

Finally, a look at the Evasiveness Index. This is basically the proportion of injury instances for each team that have been described as either "Undisclosed" or the helpfully pointless "Upper/Lower Body" in the same TSN profiles. I have made no judgement about whether the many instances of "Illness" (i.e. concussion), "Flu" (i.e. concussion) should also be included.

Expect the Flames' figure to plummet further under the direction of known media recluse Brian Burke. Since last time, we've had flu, ankle, two knees and an illness from them, although the last one might have been Bobby Ryan trying to spell something else.

Notes/Disclaimers

Figures exclude a few minor-leaguers / marginal NHLers (usually an arbitrary judgement on my part) who had been on the NHL club’s IR since pre-season. Generally, if a minor-leaguer gets called up and then injured in an NHL game, his games missed will then count towards the CHIP though. Minor-league conditioning stints immediately after/during a period on IR might be included in the man-games lost figures (but can't guarantee I get it right every time)

For the avoidance of doubt, suspensions and absences due to "personal reasons" are not included in the figures. However, as per previous seasons, any "retired" player still under contract (Savard, Pronger, Ohlund) is still included.

There are undoubtedly a few inaccuracies and inconsistencies in there - I do the best I can with the information out there. Corrections might well be picked up in subsequent updates

The cap figure obviously doesn't really correlate very well to the "worth" of a player in some cases, e.g. where players are seeing out an old (underpaid or rookie) contract or where players are horrendously overpaid and/or were signed by Paul Holmgren

Also, for any player traded where cap hit is retained by his old team, the cap hit used will only reflect that for his current team.

Get in touch if you want a full team-by-team listing of games missed and CHIP/CMIP numbers by each player (web sharing of this no longer playing ball with me)

Injury/games/TOI info courtesy of tsn.ca and nhl.com - man-games lost info more than likely does not exactly match up with the "official" figures released by individual teams